Chinese audiences’ judgments on culturally incongruent product placement in movies. An online experiment

In the past ten years, the product placement market in China has been activated by the increasing cooperation between brands and various media programs. Dating back to the year of 2009, the appearance of several Chinese brands in the Hollywood blockbuster, Transformers, could be considered the starting line of Chinese brands seeking for greater influence through imported media contents. Movies, as the major imported entertainment media commodity in China, naturally became the main field of the product placement collaboration of Chinese brands and foreign media hosts. In this process, the contradiction between the Perceived Brand Globalness (PBG) of the Chinese products and the Cultural settings of the foreign movies were discovered and criticized by some of the major news platforms in China. However, this may not represent the opinions of the Chinese movie audiences on the placement. In this case, this study investigated to what extent cultural congruence of Chinese product placement in movies influences Chinese audience’s judgment of it. Hypotheses were formulated according to previous studies relating to cultural congruency in advertising and product placement fields. To test the hypotheses, this study incorporated a quantitative method to collect comparable numerical data. An online experiment was conducted on Chinese audiences to compare their judgment of the product placement in different culturally congruent contexts. The experiment measured the PBG levels of several selected Chinese brands, the localness and foreignness of movie settings, and the ethical and evaluative judgment of the Chinese audiences on the placement. The results from an ANCOVA suggested that, firstly, the Chinese audiences would not ethically judge a product placement differently according to the PBG levels or the cultural settings of a movie. Secondly, the products of medium PBG level would receive more positive evaluative judgment of their placement in a very limited effect size, while the cultural settings of the movie would not make a difference. Lastly, the cultural congruency levels would not cause the audience’s judgment to vary in different degrees. In conclusion, the cultural congruency could be considered not a decisive factor of the Chinese audiences assessing the quality of the product placement.